Archive for the 'Awards' Category

Samee Zahur won the Computer Science Outstanding Graduate Research Award, our department’s annual award for the most outstanding graduate student. Congratulations to Samee on the much-deserved award! (Unfortunately, Samee wasn’t present to receive the award since he is in Sofia presenting his half gates work at Eurocrypt 2015.)

Congratulations to Samee Zahur for winning the iDash Secure Genomics competition (Hamming Distance challenge task), sponsored by Human Longevity, Inc. A video of the event is available at http://www.humangenomeprivacy.org/.

Samee’s solution was built using Obliv-C, and the code will be posted soon.

Yuchen Zhou won the Rader Graduate Research Award for Computer Engineering! This award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering recognizes outstanding research by a Computer Engineering PhD student.

Jonathan joined our research group as a first year student (recruited from cs1120) and has done several research projects focused on web security including working on GuardRails and leading a new research project on correlating web application state and requests with behavior such as database requests.

Peter Chapman – Male Runner-Up

Senior at University of Virginia

Peter Chapman is a Senior at the University of Virginia majoring in Computer Science and Cognitive Science.

Computer security and privacy is a critical concern, especially when medical issues are involved. Peter developed a method for automatically searching web applications to find side-channel vulnerabilities in web applications. He applied new statistical tools to better describe these vulnerabilities. In the end, he determined that 88% of queries to Google Health could be recovered by an eavesdropping adversary.

Peter has also worked on secure computation, where parties collaborate on computing a function of two inputs without exposing the inputs to each other. He has proposed novel applications of secure computation in smartphones, and is working on an improved approach to mobile secure computation, relying on the network carrier to provide suitable streams of randomness.